Sixteen young artists (18 to 35 years old), from nine different countries in Europe and the Mediterranean, have been selected by BJCEM and Food Wave as winners of the first call for artists “Every food is a landscape”.
The artists will participate in a dedicated exhibition curated by Marco Trulli to be held in October at the Beeozanam community hub in Turin; two of them will be in residence for ten days to carry out a participatory project.
Video works, paintings, performances and installations will reflect on the food-climate nexus as proposed by the call that obtained great interest as 85 artists from 20 countries applied.
Selected artists:
Beatrice Caruso (Italy), Filipa Cruz (Portugal), Chiara De Maria (Italy), Lucia Di Pietro (Italy), Anna Fainareti Lioka (Greece), Hajnal Gyeviki (Hungary), Ceren Hamiloglu (Turkey), Mira Hirtz (UK), Shuai Peng (italy), Despina Petridou (Cyprus), Maria Nissan (Jordan), Mila Panic (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Giulio Saverio Rossi (Italy), Elektra Stampolou (Greece), Agnese Spolverini (Italy), Dimitris Theocharis (Greece).
Beatrice Caruso
The dry stone walling are structures spread in Italy, as well as in other countries: Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland. They play a vital role in preventing landslides, floods and avalanches, and in combating erosion and desertification of the land, enhancing biodiversity and creating adequate microclimatic conditions for agriculture.
The project consists of two different works: a video about the presence of dry stone walls in Sicily
and a series of posters that the people can bring with them.
One face of the poster will be made of satellite images of dry stones walls from Google Maps, edited to resembling a texture or a pattern. This because dry stones structures are something very similar to a pattern in the landscape that, paradoxically, from the aereal view partly disappear.
The other side of the poster show some drawings with the “instruction” to understand dry stones walls. This to comunicate in a simple way how much useful and precious are this structures in the management of water.
Filipa Cruz | A fierce hunger echoes when you sow dreams and flowers
“A fierce hunger echoes when you sow dreams and flowers” starts from the relationship between word and matter in artistic production. The project introduces flour as a common temporal and geographical landscape of humanity. The poetics of the landscape is stimulated by the imagery and the wordplay that the phrase instigates. The sentence explores proximity when challenges the observer to reflect on the content and on the relationships that the material, the context,and the sentence propose nowadays. Combining the understanding of one of the bases of food sources, it proposes the valorization of cereals, the need to think about food scarcity when access to it is difficult.
Chiara De Maria | The greenery project
The greenery project is a participatory art project that aims to trigger a process of care and protection of wild plants by raising awareness among the local population. It is a project designed to reawaken the close connection between the native wild plants of an area and the people who live there.
Lucia Di Pietro | Not you chickory
Not you chickory is a workshop that celebrates the ability of wild chicory (and other weeds in urban spaces) to escape the regime of culinary oppression. Not your chickory is a workshop designed to interview and, above all, be interwieved by the”failed food,” that is, the flora that grows wild along city sidewalks and does not allow itself to be eaten, domesticated, determined by the human.The chicory weed expresses, by its very being, existing, pervading, an active resistance to the expectations humans have upon its species.This chicory, and its wild urban sisters, escape the rules set by humans on the control and exploitation of natural resources: they are a living manifesto of anthropocentric failure.
Anna Fainareti Lioka | Her seeds will heal you
Her seeds will heal you, is an experimental film/video installation (8 channel audio). The projection will be in the ceiling and the setup of the speakers will be circular, allowing the visitor to enter inside the circle and sit down and look up at the projection and experience the piece. The piece explores the relation between soil, seeds, regional plants, the process of growing and femininity. Starting from the seeds and their relation to Gaia as the main element of the narration, poetic gestures between stories of the past and the imaginaries of the future will emerge.
Hajnal Gyeviki | The skhrinking table
The idea is based on scientific data visualisation/data physicalisation of soil erosion. The few feet thick topsoil, or “dirt”, is what humanity’s life depends on. Shrinking of this soil will render it unfit for cultivation. This is a measurable process, which we can visualise as a shrinking table top. As it thins, it becomes less and less suitable for serving food as we are used to, and thus loses its function. The focus is on the quantitative degradation of the soil-with a parallel reference to food as a sign of diminishing food security.
Ceren Hamiloglu | It takes the whole world to make one condiment
This research looks at the ways in which piccalilli arrived, settled and has been used in Cyprus as an inseparable part of cold sandwiches, thus sandwich carts, spaces (and seasons)in which the carts functioned,as well as the narratives that surround this condiment, from family memories to Cyprus’s history as a British colony.The historical journey of the piccalilli will be thoroughly mapped and visualized using references to recipe books and videos.
Mira Hirtz | Sensing potatoes
This project started with the artist holding a potato in my hand and for a moment, observing rather than immediately pealing it. The artist went through a thought process that ecological theorist Bruno Latour taught her: which dependencies did you rely on so that this potato was able to arrive in my hand? The dependencies of money trading, of transport, of farming, of earth and sun, of a history of cultivation throughout the world, travelling continents along colonial trajectories, a rich cultural history.
Maria Nissan | Plastic on my plate
The immersive installation named “plastic on my plate” aims at raising awareness and challenging assumptions around the use of plastic in the food supply chain. Following the different steps of a tomato, the most consumed vegetable in Jordan and in the world, the audience is confronted with the amount of plastic used at each stage of the process and its environmental consequence.
Mila Panic | Strawberry field
The strawberry jams were created as an alternative “map”, made from strawberries picked from a recently cleared minefield. The minefields around Brcko, where the artist grew up, are ‘the dark spots” on the map. The daily personal interaction of passing these forbidden landscapes made the artist wonder if the artistic practice could provide a different way to understand and visually present such spaces, to provide alternative „maps“ of this social and mental terra incognita. The Strawberry field is the imaginary space where the future possibilities are presented
Shuai Peng | Dislocated familiarity
This project consists of two daily paintings made in 2022 and images taken between 2011 and 2022.The project aims to show a wide range of rural landscapes that are places where the artist have lived, which could create a disorientation or a familiarity. It represents a visual input for a narration of a hydration between the native and the invasive (the father of the artist sowing the Chinese celery”Shui Qing Cai” (水青菜）in a peripheral canal of Reggio Emilia), the agrarian field and wild fields, and the mutation of a culture
Despina Petridou | Dough Fringe 2
Dough Fringe 2 explores the theme of ‘food’ through the spectrum of materiality and gender. This installation appropriates traditional techniques and procedures directly linked to food and subsequently the domestic space – kneading, rolling, knotting, tying, drying – presenting them in an unexpected format to surface new interpretations and discussions into an already contested history. The notions of repetitiveness and routine manifest within Dough Fringe 2, reflecting interpretations of reproductive work sustaining domesticity.
Giulio Saverio Rossi | The Eucalyptus forest
The work The Eucalyptus forest consists of one or more large-sized painted canvas elements that represent the image of these forests, ideal for industry but harmful to the ecosystem. In the paintings a single tree is presented repeated in different sizes, generating a sense of restlessness of the image between artificial and natural
Elektra Stampoulou
The work proposed is a participatory installation based on the parable of the long spoons, and focuses on food consumption as a communal ritual, highlighting the need for nourishment and care especially during precarious times. In the parable encountered across various cultures and in many versions, people are given an adequate amount of food to eat, but also have a particular restriction: very long spoons are strapped onto their hands, not allowing them to feed themselves, resulting in failure to eat, starvation and animosity. It is only by using the long spoons to feed each other across the table, taking turns, that every person can eat and thrive. Practically, the idea is to create approximately ten spoons and one pot/container in which the food will be placed, made of recycled blown glass. Participants from the local community will be invited to sit around the table and figure out the way in which to eat using them. The transparency and frailty of the material will stress even further the care in which the participants will have to treat both the sculptural utensils, and the process of feeding each other.
Agnese Spolverini
In the regions of Tuscia and Agro-Falisco the land has been exploited for years, preparing the ground for hazel-nut monoculture, which is creating a new landscape and violently polluting the environment.
The exploration of the human landscape will also be accompanied by an exploration of the geographic land-scape, an illusory landscape that at a quick glance may seem untouched but in which “the most frequent char-acters [are] hazelnut groves. Those as clean as a parlor and those overrun by brambles, […] those yellowed by herbicide and those soaking in the grass, […] those mechanized and those abandoned, […] those that were once pastures and those that are forest again.
Dimitris Theocharis | The analysis of reality produces reality
The work concerns the encounter of the mathematical formula of triangulation with some potatoes.
The purpose of this formula is to characterize a surface. Here, although the technique is successfully applied on the surface of the potato, at the same time it is the agent that allows the potato’s skin to interact directly with the environment, changing the very vegetable that is appointed to characterize.
The process starts with the formation of a triangulated hexagon on the surface of the potato. This hexagon is surrounded by new triangles, following given rules, until the entire surface is triangulated.
The division of the surface into triangles, expressed through a slight engraving on the outer part, changes the way each potato interacts with its environment as time passes. The incisions gradually begin to deepen and to acquire a darker hue, while at the same time the overall exterior part begins to soften.
The steps of the algorithm are combined with the ones of the natural process of rotting, manifesting a new form under the influence of the environment.
Image credits: Chiara De Maria, The Greenery project, 2022
